Month: July 2010

On Tuesday, August 3rd at 7:30pm the common council will vote to support (or not) a grant proposal pitched by city planning coordinator Suzanne Cahill through the Financial and Economic Development Committee. The meeting will take place at Kingston’s City Hall at 420 Broadway.

The Ulster County Fair kicks off next Tuesday, August 3, and runs to Sunday, August 8. There’ll be music, food vendors, and rides, of course, as well as cows, horses, poultry and other animals raised with pride from 4-Hers. For more details, check out the fair webpage here. Regarding the fair’s history, the event is in its 141 year and launched in Ellenville. Subsequent years had the fair at the Kingston Armory on Manor Avenue before movings for many years to Forsyth Park in Kingston. Read the history here.

KINGSTON – More than a half century of research by City Historian Edwin M. Ford has yielded a new book, Street Whys: Anecdotes and Lore of Kingston, N.Y. A book signing will take place on Saturday, July 31 and Sunday, August 1, 1- 4 p.m. at the Friends of Historic Kingston Museum.

Each year, Lydia DeJohnette organizes benefit concerts that feature her husband, the legendary Jack DeJohnette, in a series of concerts to raise money in support of the Queens Galley, Family of Woodstock and other local endeavors through live music. This year, the group will perform at Falcon Arts in Marlboro, NY as well as the Culinary Institute of America.

Inspired by a post on the KingstonCitizens.org facebook page, we decided to create a survey for citizens to share their current thoughts and ideas on how to improve the city parking meter situation for residents, businesses and shoppers.

Well I’ll be. As I was exploring the possibilities of a citywide educational campaign for removing pesticides from playgrounds, schools and municipal properties in the city of Kingston, my friend Alice Andrews pointed out that in April of this year New York State created legislation to ban pesticides from these very places (minus the municipal properties). That means, that it is not legal to spray pesticides on any school athletic fields or school playgrounds now in NY State. The new law will go into effect in 180 days, giving schools a full year to completely faze out all of their pesticides and begin to use organic methods.

Did you know that about 8 in 10 children are diagnosed with something called ‘Sensory Processing Disorder‘? Many in the field believe it is caused by environmental factors that include pesticides.

Let’s keep an eye on this in Kingston. Bring it to your Aldermans attention. Copy the legislation and bring it to your school principal. Let’s make sure what’s on the books is absolutely enforced.

On Monday, July 19th LVanHart Artist Productions and 323 Wall Street will debut a brand new jazz series in Kingston, NY. The concert series will focus on the brightest talent on the jazz scene today. Guest artists will be drawn from the wealth of local talent that is in our geographic region, as well as bringing in the best that the New York jazz scene has to offer.

Jazz @ WallSpace is fortunate to have Steve Wilson and Vic Juris coming from NYC, joining forces with two locals, Jay Anderson from New Paltz, and Dennis Mackrel makes his home in Woodstock. This quartet exemplifies the mission of Jazz @ WallSpace. These four fabulous musicians have all played together in different configurations, but never in this quartet. Wilson and Anderson currently tour together in Maria Schneiders Orchestra. Anderson and Mackrel have performed together with Chaka Khan and Maria Schneider, as well as local favorite, Betty MacDonald. Juris has performed with Wilson, Anderson and Mackrel, with his own groups, with the Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars, among others.

On the outskirts of the city of Kingston, NY. there is a bike shop that is wonderfully old school.

Last fall, Larry and I went looking for our sons very first bike. Lucky for me, I came across the “Famous Bike Brothers” out on Boices Lane. In business since 1974, their small shop was filled with a great selection of bikes, helmets and gloves. The service was outstanding, too.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could think drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation in NY State for a natural gas source is a good idea. Knowing the real environmental dangers and hazard to our surface water in the Southern Tier and Catskills regions is enough to call the whole thing off.

Last year, I received a phone call from a fairly new resident to Kingston named Sean Griffin who wished to discuss a great idea. He called it the “Hudson Valley Currency” back then – a local currency he and his group hoped to design to work in the area.

How would a local currency be implemented into our current system you ask? KingstonCitizens.org was able to get the lowdown from David McCarthy, one of the three partners (the others are Sean and Chris Fenichel-Hewitt who we hope to catch up with at a later date) to explain.

Leave it to Ev Mann (Executive Director of the Center for Creative Education) to bring someone as special as Eda Zavala Lopez to Midtown Kingston. The two met when she was in NY in April working on a project for indigenous rights at the UN. A noted healer from the Peruvian Amazon, Eda is descended from a long line of healers in the tradition of the Wari people.In July, Hudson Valley residents will have two unique opportunities to see her.